What Did You Say?

Everyone claims they want to include realistic dialogue in their stories. Publishers claim they want natural-sounding dialogue.

No, you don't.

Much of the work I did as a graduate student in linguistics required listening to or reading transcripts of real, natural conversations. They are rarely anything you'd want in a story.

Listen cklosely to the people around you as they talk. They interrupt each other, and themselves. They pepper their utterances with um, you know, like, uh, and other filler words that we don't usually want in fictional conversations. They will often stammer and echo their own words, like this: He took took the the the car this morning. Many people will stop for a long pause just before the key word in a sentence: I wish they would.... Would what? Digressions are common; they start to tell a story, then interrupt themselves with a secondary story, and sometimes never get back to the original point.

What we really want when we say we want realistic dialogue is a well-edited, idealized version of the things we say-- the version we hear in our thoughts rather than what actually comes out of our mouths.